The U.K. government should offer tax credits to businesses that upgrade their networking equipment to support IPv6, according to Vint Cerf, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of the internet.

Cerf, who co-invented TCP/IP, said on Thursday that businesses in the U.K. and the rest of Europe risked being cut off from customers in parts of the world that do have widespread IPv6 support. There will be no more IPv4 addresses available within two years' time, meaning no new people or devices will be able to be added to the Internet using this legacy address type.

Speaking at the launch yesterday of 6UK, an organization devoted to getting the country switched over to the new version of the Internet Protocol, Cerf--now Google's chief Internet evangelist--said businesses using the IPv6 protocol version should get financial incentives.